My Winter on the Nile

Far ahead of us the cataract people are seen in lines and groups, half-hidden by the rocks, pulling and stumbling along; black figures are scattered along lifting the ropes over the jagged stones, and freeing them so that we shall not be drawn back, as we slowly advance; and severe as their toil is, it is not enough to keep them warm when the chilly wind strikes them. They get bruised on the rocks also, and have time to show us their barked shins and request backsheesh. An Egyptian is never too busy or too much in peril to forget to prefer that request at the sight of a traveler. When we turn into the double twist I spoke of above, the bow goes sideways upon a rock, and the stern is not yet free. The punt-poles are brought into requisition; half the men are in the water; there is poling and pushing and grunting, heaving, and “Yah Mohammed, Yah Mohammed” with all which noise and outlay of brute strength, the boat moves a little on and still is held close in hand. The current runs very swiftly We have to turn almost by a right angle to the left and then by the same angle to the right; and the question is whether the boat is not too long to turn in the space. We just scrape along the rocks, the current growing every moment stronger, and at length get far enough to let the stern swing. I run back to see if it will go free. It is a close fit. The stern is clear; but if our boat had been four or five feet longer, her voyage would have ended then and there. There is now before us a straight pull up the swiftest and narrowest rapid we have thus far encountered.

Our sandal—the row-boat belonging to the dahabeëh, that becomes a felucca when a mast is stepped into it—which has accompanied us fitfully during the passage, appearing here and there tossing about amid the rocks, and aiding occasionally in the transport of ropes and men to one rock and another, now turns away to seek a less difficult passage. The rocks all about us are low, from three feet to ten feet high. We have one rope out ahead, fastened to a rock, upon which stand a gang of men, pulling. There is a row of men in the water under the left side of the boat, heaving at her with their broad backs, to prevent her smashing on the rocks. But our main dragging force is in the two long lines of men attached to the ropes on the left shore. They stretch out ahead of us so far that it needs an opera-glass to discover whether the leaders are pulling or only soldiering. These two long struggling lines are led and directed by a new figure who appears upon this operatic scene. It is a comical Sheykh, who stands upon a high rock at one side and lines out the catch-lines of a working refrain, while the gangs howl and haul, in a surging chorus. Nothing could be wilder or more ludicrous, in the midst of this roar of rapids and strain of cordage. The Sheykh holds a long staff which he swings like the baton of the leader of an orchestra, quite unconscious of the odd figure he cuts against the blue sky. He grows more and more excited, he swings his arms, he shrieks, but always in tune and in time with the hauling and the wilder chorus of the cataract men, he lifts up his right leg, he lifts up his left leg, he is in the very ecstasy of the musical conductor, displaying his white teeth, and raising first one leg and then the other in a delirious swinging motion, all the more picturesque on account of his flowing blue robe and his loose white cotton drawers. He lifts his leg with a gigantic pull, which is enough in itself to draw the boat onward, and every time he lifts it, the boat gains on the current. Surely such an orchestra and such a leader was never seen before. For the orchestra is scattered over half an acre of ground, swaying and pulling and singing in rhythmic show, and there is a high wind and a blue sky, and rocks and foaming torrents, and an African village with palms in the background, amid the debris of the great convulsion of nature which has resulted in this chaos. Slowly we creep up against the stiff boiling stream, the good Moslems on deck muttering prayers and telling their beads, and finally make the turn and pass the worst eddies; and as we swing round into an ox-bow channel to the right, the big sail is again let out and hauled in, and with cheers we float on some rods and come into a quiet shelter, a stage beyond the journey usually made the first day. It is now three o’clock.

We have come to the real cataract, to the stiffest pull and the most dangerous passage.

A small freight dahabeëh obstructs the way, and while this is being hauled ahead, we prepare for the final struggle. The chief cataract is called Bab (gate) Aboo Rabbia, from one of Mohammed Ali’s captains who some years ago vowed that he would take his dahabeëh up it with his own crew and without aid from the cataract people. He lost his boat. It is also sometimes called Bab Inglese from a young Englishman, named Cave, who attempted to swim down it early one morning, in imitation of the Nubian swimmers, and was drawn into the whirlpools, and not found for days after. For this last struggle, in addition to the other ropes, an enormous cable is bent on, not tied to the bow, but twisted round the cross-beams of the forward deck, and carried out over the rocks. From the shelter where we lie we are to push out and take the current at a sharp angle. The water of this main cataract sucks down from both sides above through a channel perhaps one hundred feet wide, very rapid and with considerable fall, and with such force as to raise a ridge in the middle. To pull up this hill of water is the tug; if the ropes let go we shall be dashed into a hundred pieces on the rocks below and be swallowed in the whirlpools. It would not be a sufficient compensation for this fate to have this rapid hereafter take our name.

The preparations are leisurely made, the lines are laid along the rocks and the men are distributed. The fastenings are carefully examined. Then we begin to move. There are now four conductors of this gigantic orchestra (the employment of which as a musical novelty I respectfully recommend to the next Boston Jubilee), each posted on a high rock, and waving a stick with a white rag tied to it. It is now four o’clock. An hour has been consumed in raising the curtain for the last act. We are now carefully under way along the rocks which are almost within reach, held tight by the side ropes, but pushed off and slowly urged along by a line of half-naked fellows under the left side, whose backs are against the boat and whose feet walk along the perpendicular ledge. It would take only a sag of the boat, apparently, to crush them. It does not need our eyes to tell us when the bow of the boat noses the swift water. Our sandal has meantime carried a line to a rock on the opposite side of the channel, and our sailors haul on this and draw us ahead. But we are held firmly by the shore lines. The boat is never suffered, as I said, to get an inch the advantage, but is always held tight in hand.

As we appear at the foot of the rapid, men come riding down it on logs as before, a sort of horseback feat in the boiling water, steering themselves round the eddies and landing below us. One of them swims round to the rock where a line is tied, and looses it as we pass; another, sitting on the slippery stick and showing the white soles of his black feet, paddles himself about amid the whirlpools. We move so slowly that we have time to enjoy all these details, to admire the deep yellow of the Libyan sand drifted over the rocks at the right, and to cheer a sandal bearing the American flag which is at this moment shooting the rapids in another channel beyond us, tossed about like a cork. We see the meteor flag flashing out, we lose it behind the rocks, and catch it again appearing below. “Oh star spang”—but our own orchestra is in full swing again. The comical Sheykh begins to swing his arms and his stick back and forth in an increasing measure, until his whole body is drawn into the vortex of his enthusiasm, and one leg after the other, by a sort of rhythmic hitch, goes up displaying the white and baggy cotton drawers. The other three conductors join in, and a deafening chorus from two hundred men goes up along the ropes, while we creep slowly on amid the suppressed excitement of those on board who anxiously watch the straining cables, and with a running fire of “backsheesh, backsheesh,” from the boys on the rocks close at hand. The cable holds; the boat nags and jerks at it in vain; through all the roar and rush we go on, lifted I think perceptibly every time the sheykh lifts his leg.

At the right moment the sail is again shaken down; and the boat at once feels it. It is worth five hundred men. The ropes slacken; we are going by the wind against the current; haste is made to unbend the cable; line after line is let go until we are held by one alone; the crowd thins out, dropping away with no warning and before we know that the play is played out, the cataract people have lost all interest in it and are scattering over the black rocks to their homes. A few stop to cheer; the chief conductor is last seen on a rock, swinging the white rag, hurrahing and salaaming in grinning exultation; the last line is cast off, and we round the point and come into smooth but swift water, and glide into a calm mind. The noise, the struggle, the tense strain, the uproar of men and waves for four hours are all behind; and hours of keener excitement and enjoyment we have rarely known. At 12.20 we left Assouan; at 4.45 we swung round the rocky bend above the last and greatest rapid. I write these figures, for they will be not without a melancholy interest to those who have spent two or three days or a week in making this passage.

Turning away from the ragged mountains of granite which obstruct the straight course of the river, we sail by Mahatta, a little village of Nubians, a port where the trading and freight boats plying between the First and Second Cataract load and unload. There is a forest of masts and spars along the shore which is piled with merchandise, and dotted with sunlit figures squatting in the sand as if waiting for the goods to tranship themselves. With the sunlight slanting on our full sail, we glide into the shadow of high rocks, and enter, with the suddenness of a first discovery, into a deep winding river, the waters of which are dark and smooth, between lofty walls of granite. These historic masses, which have seen pass so many splendid processions and boastful expeditions of conquest in what seems to us the twilight of the world, and which excited the wonder of Father Herodotus only the other day, almost in our own time (for the Greeks belong to us and not to antiquity as it now unfolds itself), are piled in strange shapes, tottling rock upon rock, built up grotesquely, now in likeness of an animal, or the gigantic profile of a human face, or temple walls and castle towers and battlements. We wind through this solemn highway, and suddenly, in the very gateway, Philæ! The lovely! Philæ, the most sentimental ruin in Egypt. There are the great pylon of the temple of Isis, the long colonnades of pillars, the beautiful square temple, with lofty columns and elongated capitals, misnamed Pharaoh’s bed. The little oblong island, something like twelve hundred feet long, banded all round by an artificial wall, an island of rock completely covered with ruins, is set like the stone of a ring, with a circle of blue water about it, in the clasp of higher encircling granite peaks and ledges. On the left bank, as we turn to pass to the east of the island, is a gigantic rock which some persons have imagined was a colossus once, perhaps in pre-Adamic times, but which now has no resemblance to human shape, except in a breast and left arm. Some Pharaoh cut his cartouche on the back—a sort of postage-stamp to pass the image along down the ages. The Pharaohs were ostentatious; they cut their names wherever they could find a conspicuous and smooth place.

While we are looking, distracted with novelty at every turn and excited by a grandeur and loveliness opening upon us every moment, we have come into a quiet haven, shut in on all sides by broken ramparts,—alone with this island of temples. The sun is about to set, and its level light comes to us through the columns, and still gilds with red and yellow gold the Libyan sand sifted over the cliffs. We moor at once to a sand-bank which has formed under the broken walls, and at once step on shore. We climb to the top of the temple walls; we walk on the stone roof; we glance into the temple on the roof, where is sculptured the resurrection of Osiris. This cannot be called an old temple. It is a creation of the Ptolemies, though it doubtless replaced an older edifice. The temple of Isis was not begun more than three centuries before our era. Not all of these structures were finished—the priests must have been still carving on their walls these multitudes of sculptures, when Christ began his mission; and more than four centuries after that the mysterious rites of Isis were still celebrated in these dark chambers. It is silent and dead enough here now; and there lives nowhere upon the earth any man who can even conceive the state of mind that gave those rites vitality. Even Egypt has changed its superstitions.

Peace has come upon the earth after the strain of the last few hours. We can scarcely hear the roar of the rapids, in the beating of which we had been. The sun goes, leaving a changing yellow and faint orange on the horizon. Above in the west is the crescent moon; and now all the sky thereabout is rosy, even to the zenith, a delicate and yet deep color, like that of the blush-rose—a transparent color that glows. A little later we see from our boat the young moon through the columns of the lesser temple. The January night is clear and perfectly dry; no dew is falling—no dew ever falls here—and the multiplied stars burn with uncommon lustre. When everything else is still, we hear the roar of the rapids coming steadily on the night breeze, sighing through the old and yet modern palace-temples of the parvenu Ptolemies, and of Cleopatra—a new race of conquerors and pleasure-hunters, who in vain copied the magnificent works of the ancient Pharaohs.

Here on a pylon gate, General Dessaix has recorded the fact that in February (Ventose) in the seventh year of the Republic, General Bonaparte being then in possession of Lower Egypt he pursued to this spot the retreating Memlooks. Egyptian kings, Ethiopian usurpers, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nectanebo, Cambyses, Ptolemy, Philadelphus, Cleopatra and her Roman lovers, Dessaix,—these are all shades now.

CHAPTER XX.—ON THE BORDERS OF THE DESERT

IN PASSING the First Cataract of the Nile we pass an ancient boundary line; we go from the Egypt of old to the Ethiopia of old; we go from the Egypt proper of to-day, into Nubia. We find a different country, a different river; the people are of another race; they have a different language. We have left the mild, lazy, gentle fellaheen—a mixed lot, but in general of Arabic blood—and come to Barâbra, whose district extends from Philæ to the Second Cataract, a freer, manlier, sturdier people altogether. There are two tribes of them, the Kendos and the Nooba; each has its own language.

Philæ was always the real boundary line, though the Pharaohs pushed their frontier now and again, down towards the Equator, and built temples and set up their images, as at Aboo Simbel, as at Samneh, and raked the south land for slaves and ivory, concubines and gold. But the Ethiopians turned the tables now and again, and conquered Egypt, and reigned in the palaces of the Pharaohs, taking that title even, and making their names dreaded as far as Judea and Assyria.

The Ethiopians were cousins indeed of the old Egyptians, and of the Canaanites, for they were descendants of Cush, as the Egyptians were of Mizriam, and the Canaanites were of Canaan; three of the sons of Ham. The Cushites, or Ethiops, although so much withdrawn from the theater of history, have done their share of fighting—the main business of man hitherto. Besides quarrels with their own brethren, they had often the attentions of the two chief descendants of Shem,—the Jews and the Arabs; and after Mohammed’s coming, the Arabs descended into Nubia and forced the inhabitants into their religion at the point of the sword. Even the sons of Japhet must have their crack at these children of the “Sun-burned.” It was a Roman prefect who, to avenge an attack on Svene by a warlike woman, penetrated as far south as El Berkel (of the present day), and overthrew Candace the Queen of the Ethiopians in Napata, her capital; the large city, also called Meroë, of which Herodotus heard such wonders.

Beyond Ethiopia lies the vast, black cloud of Negroland. These negroes, with the crisp, woolly hair, did not descend from anybody, according to the last reports; neither from Shem, Ham nor Japhet. They have no part in the royal house of Noah. They are left out in the heat. They are the puzzle of ethnologists, the mystery of mankind. They are the real aristocracy of the world, their origin being lost in the twilight of time; no one else can trace his descent so far back and come to nothing. M. Lenormant says the black races have no tradition of the Deluge. They appear to have been passed over altogether, then. Where were they hidden? When we first know Central Africa they are there. Where did they come from? The great effort of ethnologists is to get them dry-shod round the Deluge, since derivation from Noah is denied them. History has no information how they came into Africa. It seems to me that, in history, whenever we hear of the occupation of a new land, there is found in it a primitive race, to be driven out or subdued. The country of the primitive negro is the only one that has never invited the occupation of a more powerful race. But the negro blood, by means of slavery, has been extensively distributed throughout the Eastern world.

These reflections did not occur to us the morning we left Philæ. It was too early. In fact, the sun was just gilding “Pharaoh’s bed,” as the beautiful little Ptolemaic temple is called, when we spread sail and, in the shadow of the broken crags and savage rocks, began to glide out of the jaws of this wild pass. At early morning everything has the air of adventure. It was as if we were discoverers, about to come into a new African kingdom at each turn in the swift stream.

One must see, he carnot imagine, the havoc and destruction hereabout, the grotesque and gigantic fragments of rock, the islands of rock, the precipices of rock, made by the torrent when it broke through here. One of these islands is Biggeh—all rocks, not enough soft spot on it to set a hen. The rocks are piled up into the blue sky; from their summit we get the best view of Philæ—the jewel set in this rim of stone.

Above Philæ we pass the tomb of a holy man, high on the hill, and underneath it, clinging to the slope, the oldest mosque in Nubia, the Mosque of Belal, falling now into ruin, but the minaret shows in color no sign of great age. How should it in this climate, where you might leave a pair of white gloves upon the rocks for a year, and expect to find them unsoiled.

“How old do you suppose that mosque is Abd-el-Atti?”

“I tink about twelve hundred years old. Him been built by the Friends of our prophet when they come up here to make the people believe.”

I like this euphuism. “But,” we ask, “suppose they didn’t believe, what then?”

“When thim believe, all right; when thim not believe, do away wid ‘em.”

“But they might believe something else, if not what Mohammed believed.”

“Well, what our Prophet say? Mohammed, he say, find him anybody believe in God, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in the Christ, not to touch him; find him anybody believe in Moses, not to touch him; find him believe in the prophets, not to touch him; find him believe in bit wood, piece stone, do way wid him. Not so? Men worship something wood, stone, I can’t tell—I tink dis is nothing.”

Abd-el-Atti always says the “Friends” of Mohammed, never followers or disciples. It is a pleasant word, and reminds us of our native land. Mohammed had the good sense that our politicians have. When he wanted anything, a city taken, a new strip of territory added, a “third term,” or any trifle, he “put himself in the hands of his friends.”

The Friends were successful in this region. While the remote Abyssinians retained Christianity, the Nubians all became Moslems, and so remain to this day.

“You think, then, Abd-el-Atti, that the Nubians believed?”

“Thim ‘bliged. But I tink these fellows, all of ‘em, Musselmens as far as the throat; it don’t go lower down.”

The story is that this mosque was built by one of Mohammed’s captains after the great battle here with the Infidels—the Nubians. Those who fell in the fight, it is also only tradition, were buried in the cemetery near Assouan, and they are martyrs: to this day the Moslems who pass that way take off their slippers and shoes.

After the battle, as the corpses of the slain lay in indistinguishable heaps, it was impossible to tell who were martyrs and who were unbelievers. Mohammed therefore ordered that they should bury as Moslems all those who had large feet, and pleasant faces, with the mark of prayer on the forehead. The bodies of the others were burned as infidels.

As we sweep along, the mountains are still high on either side, and the strips of verdure are very slight. On the east bank, great patches of yellow sand, yellow as gold, and yet reddish in some lights, catch the sun.

I think it is the finest morning I ever saw, for clearness and dryness. The thermometer indicates only 60°, and yet it is not too cool. The air is like wine. The sky is absolutely cloudless, and of wonderful clarity. Here is a perfectly pure and sweet atmosphere. After a little, the wind freshens, and it is somewhat cold on deck, but the sky is like sapphire; let the wind blow for a month, it will raise no cloud, nor any film of it.

Everything is wanting in Nubia that would contribute to the discomfort of a winter residence:—

It never rains;

There is never any dew above Philæ;

There are no flies;

There are no fleas;

There are no bugs, nor any insects whatever.

The attempt to introduce fleas into Nubia by means of dahabeëhs has been a failure.

In fact there is very little animal life; scarcely any birds are seen; fowls of all sorts are rare. There are gazelles, however, and desert hares, and chameleons. Our chameleons nearly starved for want of flies. There are big crocodiles and large lizards.

In a bend a few miles above Philæ is a whirlpool called Shaymtel Wah, from which is supposed to be a channel communicating under the mountain to the Great Oasis one hundred miles distant. The popular belief in these subterranean communications is very common throughout the East. The holy well, Zem-Zem, at Mecca, has a connection with a spring at El Gebel in Syria. I suppose that is perfectly well known. Abd-el-Atti has tasted the waters of both; and they are exactly alike; besides, did he not know of a pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in Zem-Zem and recovered it in El Gebel.

This Nubia is to be sure but a river with a colored border, but I should like to make it seem real to you and not a mere country of the imagination. People find room to live here; life goes on after a fashion, and every mile there are evidences of a mighty civilization and a great power which left its record in gigantic works. There was a time, before the barriers broke away at Silsilis, when this land was inundated by the annual rise; the Nile may have perpetually expanded above here into a lake, as Herodotus reports.

We sail between low ridges of rocky hills, with narrow banks of green and a few palms, but occasionally there is a village of square mud-houses. At Gertassee, boldly standing out on a rocky platform, are some beautiful columns, the remains of a temple built in the Roman time. The wind is strong and rather colder with the turn of noon; the nearer we come to the tropics the colder it becomes. The explanation is that we get nothing but desert winds; and the desert is cool at this season; that is, it breeds at night cool air, although one does not complain of its frigidity who walks over it at midday.

After passing Tafa, a pretty-looking village in the palms, which boasts ruins both pagan and Christian, we come to rapids and scenery almost as wild and lovely as that at Philæ. The river narrows, there are granite rocks and black boulders in the stream; we sail for a couple of miles in swift and deep water, between high cliffs, and by lofty rocky islands—not without leafage and some cultivation, and through a series of rapids, not difficult but lively. And so we go cheerily on, through savage nature and gaunt ruins of forgotten history; past Kalâbshe, where are remains of the largest temple in Nubia; past Bayt el Wellee—“the house of the saint”—where Rameses II. hewed a beautiful temple out of the rock; past Gerf Hossdyn, where Rameses II. hewed a still larger temple out of the rock and covered it with his achievements, pictures in which he appears twelve feet high, and slaying small enemies as a husbandman threshes wheat with a flail. I should like to see an ancient stone wall in Egypt, where this Barnum of antiquity wasn’t advertising himself.

We leave him flailing the unfortunate; at eight in the evening we are still going on, first by the light of the crescent moon, and then by starlight, which is like a pale moonlight, so many and lustrous are the stars; and last, about eleven o’clock we go aground, and stop a little below Dakkeh, or seventy-one miles from Philæ, that being our modest run for the day.

Dakkeh, by daylight, reveals itself as a small mud-village attached to a large temple. You would not expect to find a temple here, but its great pylon looms over the town and it is worth at least a visit. To see such a structure in America we would travel a thousand miles; the traveler on the Nile debates whether he will go ashore.

The bank is lined with the natives who have something to sell, eggs, milk, butter in little greasy “pats,” and a sheep. The men are, as to features and complexion, rather Arabic than Nubian. The women have the high cheek-bones and broad faces of our Indian squaws, whom they resemble in a general way. The little girls who wear the Nubian costume (a belt with fringe) and strings of beads, are not so bad; some of them well formed. The morning is cool and the women all wear some outer garment, so that the Nubian costume is not seen in its simplicity, except as it is worn by children. I doubt if it is at any season. So far as we have observed the Nubian women they are as modest in their dress as their Egyptian sisters. Perhaps ugliness and modesty are sisters in their country. All the women and girls have their hair braided in a sort of plait in front, and heavily soaked with grease, so that it looks as if they had on a wig or a frontlet of leather; it hangs in small, hard, greasy curls, like leathern thongs, down each side. The hair appears never to be undone—only freshly greased every morning. Nose-rings and earrings abound.

This handsome temple was began by Ergamenes, an Ethiopian king ruling at Meroë, at the time of the second Ptolemy, during the Greek period; and it was added to both by Ptolemies and Cæsars. This Nubia would seem to have been in possession of Ethiopians and Egyptians turn and turn about, and, both having the same religion, the temples prospered.

Ergamenes has gained a reputation by a change he made in his religion, as it was practiced in Meroë. When the priests thought a king had reigned long enough it was their custom to send him notice that the gods had ordered him to die; and the king, who would rather die than commit an impiety, used to die. But Ergamenes tried another method, which he found worked just as well; he assembled all the priests, and slew them—a very sensible thing on his part.